BARROW Raiders boss Paul Crarey is hoping to have his side firing on all cylinders when the 2024 Betfred Championship action gets underway.

Crarey’s men exited the Challenge Cup last weekend after a 22-10 defeat at home to big-spending League One side Oldham.

This weekend Raiders will learn their AB Sundecks 1895 quarter-final opponents with the draw being streamed live on the BBC Sport website – coverage begins at around 4.45pm.

The Cumbrians then have a bit of a wait to get their league campaign started, with their first game away to Widnes Vikings on Sunday, March 17.

For some the start of a new season can’t come soon enough, but the time between now and that first league clash could be just what Crarey needs.

He told The Mail: “We have some players who are carrying little niggles, while our captain Jarrad Stack was suspended for the Oldham game and Max Clarke missed that game due to concussion protocols.

“But we are hoping when the Championship season comes around in a couple of weeks we’ll be healthy and everyone will be fit to play.

“Tom Walker is a couple of weeks away and Shane Toal is about the same.

“Our goal is to get everybody healthy for when the league starts, because for us this year the league is very, very important.

“Really it is very, very important to everybody because we don’t know what is happening with the league structures.

“That means we have to do our best to have a really good league campaign and to do that we need to try to keep all of our players healthy.

“We have worked really hard to build the squad over the close season and we want to push on in the Championship and show what we are all about.

“But we know to do that then we have to be able to call on our big guns, and hopefully we can keep them all as healthy as possible throughout the season.”